1. Field of the Inventive Concept
The present inventive concept relates to storage devices and methods of driving storage devices.
2. Description of the Related Art
Flash memories have the capability of electrically erasing all of the data of a cell at once. Flash memories are therefore widely used in computers, memory cards, and other electronic devices. Recently, as the use of mobile information devices, such as cellular phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and digital cameras, is increasing, flash memory is increasingly being used for data storage instead of hard disk drives. Mobile devices are increasingly requiring larger data storage capacity to provide a variety of functions (for example, motion picture play, high sound quality music play, etc.).
De-duplication is a technique of eliminating redundant data while sharing one piece of data when a plurality of pieces of same data exists in a storage device. Conventional de-duplication techniques have been developed based on hard disk drive operational techniques. Development of de-duplication technique has focused on, for example, expediting de-duplication, using a minimum amount of additional data, and so on.